[jbrennan]

This is basically how I run my publishing engine (you can read more about it at the "Colophon" part of this article: http://nearthespeedoflight.com/article/about_the_redesign ).

I wanted to teach myself Ruby and I figured this was a great way to maintain a site, as I'm terrible with both SQL and security. Git solves security and DataMapper solves the SQL, and my Ruby lubricates the rest.

[soult]

You could use git directly for metadata instead of relying on some JSON file. Git will tell you when an article was created and by whom. It will also tell you when and by whom each edit was made.

[jbrennan]

True. But my metadata needs exceed simply who wrote the article, I also have things like tags, pubdate, update, etc.

My system actually allows for the metadata to be embedded in the main article file, but it ended up being simpler for me to split the files most of the time (the editing app I wrote does this for me, so I mostly forget about it now).